When my daughter Amaya was 3, few people on television did I dislike more than Masha, the green-eyed, precocious Russian girl from Masha and the Bear. She was a staple on the Universal Kids channel, and my preschooler was hooked. I even bought the DVDs on Amazon because she would cry if she couldn’t see a certain episode when she wanted to.
Schools, offices, playgrounds and basically life as we knew it had shut down. Like millions of parents, I was trying to work from home while entertaining a 3-year-old who didn’t understand why we couldn’t go anywhere. That’s when Masha moved in.
She was everywhere—Amaya’s imaginary friend, her birthday theme and even her Halloween costume. Every episode, I found myself wondering the same thing: “Did Masha’s parents just drop her off in the woods to fend for herself?” I wanted her to find her parents—wherever the hell they were—and leave my house. I was starting to feel like the Bear.
Six years later, Ukraine wants Masha to go home, too. Except Ukraine isn’t joking. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently imposed sanctions on five Russian citizens and four organizations involved in creating and distributing Masha and the Bear, including animation studio Animaccord.
Ukrainian officials accuse the cartoon of spreading pro-Russian narratives disguised as children’s entertainment and posing a threat to national security. Critics have also described its enormous international reach as a form of Russian soft power. The child I had spent an entire pandemic trying to evict from my living room?
Then again, much of the world has watched her. The cartoon is seen in more than 100 countries and has amassed tens of billions of YouTube views. But unlike me, Ukraine wasn’t worried about this funny-looking cartoon girl teaching children to disobey adults and terrorize innocent bears.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
